Tag: Link

If you’ve ever thought “Man, all my designs look like crap”, this may be the best ad you see all day. If you’ve desperately searched Dribbble or Behance for inspiration, yet found yourself completely unable to make something look nice, this one’s for you. And if you’ve ever had a sinking feeling that most design articles are worthless, and no matter how much you read about color theory, it’s not going to make your bad designs look good, well, let’s talk.

Learn UI Design is an online video course to take you from design newbie to being able to confidently create beautiful designs for any site or app. From color to typography, icons to process, Learn UI Design covers every aspect of interface design. Enrollment is open for 2 weeks only.

I should introduce myself. I’m Erik Kennedy. I’m an independent designer, I’ve traveled the globe designing sites and apps for companies big and small (like Soylent and Amazon), and my design writing has been read by over a million people (you might know me from this article). Yet I started out as a developer who couldn’t create nice-looking software to save his life. Sure, I developed some applications for work, created a few websites and side projects at home, even tried my hand at a nights-and-weekend startup. But there was an issue: everything I made looked like crap.

Design was something I was always interested in, but never great at. I knew what I liked, but I didn’t know how to create such a design. Consequently, everything I did had One-Man-Project syndrome: it looked like it was made by someone in their spare time – not professional, not considered, not worth the download, not worth the purchase.

In the end, I learned design the same way I’ve learned any creative endeavor: cold, hard analysis. And shameless copying of what’s worked. I’ve worked 10 hours on a UI project and billed for 1. The other 9 were the wild flailing of learning. Desperately searching Dribbble and Behance and Pinterest for some idea of how to make my awful design better.

That was the beginning, anyhow. Over time, I built up a toolset of hacks and heuristics. I was tired of reading design articles that failed the fundamental test of any skill tutorial: it didn’t help me improve what I was working on then and there. My gold standard was to find what worked. What made a difference between ugly and gorgeous. Over the years, I built up these tools across all areas of user interface design – color, typography, iconography, and so on.

Today, Learn UI Design has hundreds of happy students, and the course is used and regarded by folks like Chris Coyier…

I've been watching @erikdkennedy's Learn UI Design course to bone up a bit. He's kinda like the @wesbos of design.https://t.co/MUkcNmYdMN pic.twitter.com/QSbXvITdKG

— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) February 6, 2018

…and Jeremiah Shoaf (the founder of Typewolf).

And of course plenty of other mere mortals:

Here’s a peek at the syllabus:

I. INTRODUCTION

Begin here (11:10)

Setting Up Sketch & Asset Files for UI Design (15:36)

How to Build Your Design Gut Instinct (16:26)

3 Methods for Designing Above Your Level (10:44)

Finding & Using Design Inspiration (20:46)

II. UI FUNDAMENTALS

Analyzing Aesthetics (17:18)

Alignment (36:32)

Spacing (52:12)

Lighting & Shadows (32:28)

Grids (25:37)

Consistency (34:19)

III. COLOR

Introduction to HSB (13:32)

Luminosity (20:00)

Gray: The Most Important Color (27:32)

Adjustment: The Most Important Color Skill (34:46)

3 Ways to Fix Clashing Colors (9:09)

Picking a Primary UI Color (10:33)

Picking Secondary UI Colors (47:04)

Dark Interfaces (22:41)

Gradients (27:15)

IV. TYPOGRAPHY

Terminology: The Bare Minimum

Choosing Fonts (53:42)

Good Fonts Table

Styling Text (44:24)

Styling Text 2 (35:56)

Pairing Fonts (50:35)

7 Methods for Overlaying Text on Images (21:13)

V. USER INTERFACE COMPONENTS

Form Controls (42:38)

Icons 1: Vector Editing (30:46)

Icons 2: Icon Design (52:39)

Photography & Imagery (39:34)

Lists & Tables (41:49)

VI. REAL-WORLD PROCESS

Responsive UI Design (48:54)

Designing Multi-State Screens (38:32)

Creating a Design Portfolio (33:07)

Finding Clients (18:29)

Presenting & Getting Good Feedback on Your Designs (34:17)

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 35 videos totaling almost 20 hours of content.

Sign up now and get:

Immediate access to the full video curriculum

Dozens of multimedia resources, downloads, and homework assignments

Access to the Learn UI Design Slack community, where you can get feedback, design reviews, and more design resources

Container Queries, as in, the ability to style elements based on values from a particular element, like its width and height. We have media queries, but those are based on the viewport not individual elements. There are plenty of use cases for them. It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again, if container queries existed, the vast majority of media queries in CSS would actually be container queries.

Discussion about how to pull it off technologically gets interesting. In my mind, ideally, we get this ability right in CSS. The trouble with doing it this way is one of circularity. Not even in regards to being able to write CSS that triggers a scenario in which the query doesn’t match anymore, which is tricky enough, but literally changing the long-standing single-pass way in which browsers render a page.

The trouble with container queries isn't finding the perfect syntax or convincing anyone they are needed, it's how browsers work.https://t.co/7ZxMczD4ag pic.twitter.com/DeHyR9zRuO

— CSS-Tricks (@Real_CSS_Tricks) February 1, 2018

There are plenty of takes at solving this. All JavaScript of course. Dave Rupert rounded some of them up here. They are all a bit different.

Seems to me the most well-suited JavaScript API for this is ResizeObserver. It’s Chrome-only as I write, but here’s a chart that should stay updated in time:

This browser support data is from Caniuse, which has more detail. A number indicates that browser supports the feature at that version and up.

Desktop

Chrome

Opera

Firefox

IE

Edge

Safari

64

No

No

No

No

No

Mobile / Tablet

iOS Safari

Opera Mobile

Opera Mini

Android

Android Chrome

Android Firefox

No

No

No

No

No

No

That was a heck of a lot of words to intro the fact that Philip Walton just wrote a hell of an article about doing just this. The core of it is that you use ResizeOveserver to toss classes onto elements, then style them with those classes. He concludes:

The strategy outlined in this article:

Will work, today, on any website

Is easy to implement (copy/paste-able)

Performs just as well as a CSS-based solution

Doesn’t require any specific libraries, frameworks, or build tools.

Leverages progressive enhancement, so users on browser that lack the required APIs or have JavaScript disabled can still use the site.

The browser support for ResizeObserver is a little scary, but it’s such a nice API I would expect more widespread support sooner than later.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Responsive Components: a Solution to the Container Queries Problem is a post from CSS-Tricks

This is by far the biggest deep dive I’ve seen on CSS Variables posted to the web and it’s merely Chapter One of complete e-book on the topic.

Truth is, I’m still on the thick of reading through this myself, but had to stop somewhere in the middle to write this up and share it because it’s just that gosh-darned useful. For example, the post goes into great detail on three specific use cases for CSS Variables and breaks the code down to give a better understanding of what it does, in true tutorial fashion.

System font stacks got hot about a year ago, no doubt influenced by Mark Otto’s work putting them live on GitHub.

The why, to me, feels like (1) yay performance and (2) the site looks like the rest of the operating system. But to Mark:

Helvetica was created in 1957 when the personal computer was a pipe dream. Arial was created in 1982 and is available on 95% of computers across the web. Millions, if not billions, of web pages currently use this severely dated font stack to serve much younger content to much younger browsers and devices.

As display quality improves, so too must our use of those displays. System fonts like Apple’s San Francisco and Microsoft’s Segoe aim to do just that, taking advantage of retina screens, dynamic kerning, additional font-weights, and improved readability. If operating systems can take advantage of these changes, so too can our CSS.

I also like the team’s idea of adding emoji fonts at the end of the font declaration so that you have the best support possible for those too:

I really like this post by Brad Frost about what is and isn’t a design system, particularly when he de-emphasizes the importance of tools when it comes to that sort of work :

…components living inside static design tools like Sketch isn’t itself a design system. Pardon my clickbait. Perhaps a better title would have been “Your Sketch library is not a(n entire) design system.”

No doubt tools like Sketch are super valuable, and having a set of reusable components inside them helps design teams establish thoughtful and consistent UIs. However, a Sketch library is just one piece of the design system puzzle. A design system also can include other puzzle pieces like:

Design principles

UX guidelines

Development guidelines

Coded UI components

Component guidelines, usage, and details

Page templates

User flows

Design tools

Dev tooling

Code repositories

Voice and tone guidelines

Implementation guides

Contribution processes

Team structure

Resources (internal and external)

Other guidelines/resources/tools/process

I’ve been mulling this post over the past couple of days and I’ve started to think of design systems as much more than a suite of tools. In fact, I’m starting to think that folks who work on design systems should start to de-emphasize how important specific tools are and focus much more on the community-building aspects of the work instead.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Your Sketch library is not a design system redux is a post from CSS-Tricks

Observable launched a couple of weeks ago. As far as I understand, it’s sort of like a mix between CodePen and Medium where you create “notebooks” for exploring data, making nifty visualizations.

Check out this a note about this interesting new format, founder Mike Bostock describes a notebook as “an interactive, editable document defined by code. It’s a computer program, but one that’s designed to be easier to read and write by humans.”

All of this stuff riffs on a lot of Mike’s previous work which is definitely worth exploring further if you’re a fan of complex visualizations on the web.

The second iteration of CSS Grid is already in the works and the public editor’s draft was released last week! While it is by no means the final W3C recommendation, this draft is the start of discussions around big concepts many of us have been wanting to see since the first level was released, including subgrids:

In some cases it might be necessary for the contents of multiple grid items to align to each other. A grid container that is itself a grid item can defer the definition of its rows and columns to its parent grid container, making it a subgrid. In this case, the grid items of the subgrid participate in sizing the grid of the parent grid container, allowing the contents of both grids to align.

The currently defined characters of subgrid items are particularly interesting because they illustrate the differences between a subgrid and its parent grid. For example:

The subgrid is always stretched in both dimensions in its subgridded dimension(s): the align-self/justify-self properties on it are ignored, as are any specified width/height constraints.

In addition to subgrids, aspect-ratio-controlled gutters and conformance are also defined in the draft and worth a read. It’s great to see so much momentum around grids!

Forever I’ve used the macOS Command-Shift-4 screenshot utility to measure things. Pressing it gets you a little crosshairs cursor which you can click-and-drag to take a screenshot but, crucially, has little numbers that tell you the width/height of the selection in pixels. It’s crude, but ever so useful.

See those teeny-tiny numbers in the bottom-right? So useful, even if they are tough to read.

PixelSnap is one of those apps that, once you see it, you’re like OMG that’s the best idea ever. It’s the same kind of interaction (key command, then mouse around), but it’s drawing lines between obvious measurement points in any window at all. Plus it has this drag around and area and snap to edges thing that’s just as brilliant. Instant purchase for me.

The Product Hunt newsletter said:

Two teenage makers launched PixelSnap, a powerful design tool to measure every pixel on your screen. Hit #1 on Product Hunt, and over $5,000 in sales within 24 hours of their launch. 📝✨

Wufoo helps you build forms you can put on any website. There’s a million reasons you might need to do that, from the humble contact form, to a sales lead generation form, to a sales or registration form.

That’s powerful and useful all by itself. But Wufoo is even more powerful when you consider that it integrates with over 1,000 other web services.

Wufoo integrates with over a dozen CRM solutions, including Salesforce, Nutshell, Highrise, Nimble, and more.

Wufoo integrates with the most popular email marketing services like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Sendloop, and more.

Uri Shaked has written about his journey in AR on the web from the very early days of Google’s Project Tango to the recent A-Frame experiments from Mozilla. Front-end devs might be interested in A-Frame because of how you work with it – it’s a declarative language like HTML! I particularly like this section where Uri describes how it felt to first play around with AR:

The ability to place virtual objects in the real space, and have them stick in place even when you move around, seemed to me like we were diving down the uncanny valley, where the boundaries between the physical world and the game were beginning to blur. This was the first time I experienced AR without the need for markers or special props — it just worked out of the box, everywhere.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Web-Powered Augmented Reality: a Hands-On Tutorial is a post from CSS-Tricks